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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Barry Murphy, post: 3944835, member: 79368&quot;]These have not been published anywhere before. This is a new group that appeared late last year. The groups I saw were bought from a major US dealer at the NY International in January. When they arrived at our office, I new as soon as I opened the box that they were fake, so I showed a few to David Vagi and his initial gut reaction was the same as mine, these weren&#039;t even close to being authentic.</p><p><br /></p><p>What was wrong with them? I&#039;ve handled maybe 1000 Ephesos drachms and seen photos of 100&#039;s more. What first struck me was the color was a bit off. Next the punches looked completely wrong, they were too shallow and lacked any real texture. There were no flow lines along the edges of the incuse. That was my initial gut reaction, and my gut is right 99% of the time. It took about 2 seconds to realize these were forgeries. </p><p><br /></p><p>After looking at them a bit longer I started to see what was wrong with them from a technical standpoint. These are curved wing bees with tendrils at either side of the bees head, making them fairly early in the Ephesos series circa 5th Century BC. But these aren&#039;t like normal curved wing bees, some of these are more like droopy wing bees. The way the wings are attached to the bee&#039;s body is incorrect. Some of these look more like the bee is wearing a shawl or something and the wings are draped across the bees wings, not attached to the body at a point. Since these are early curved wing bees, the punches should be fairly deep and much more irregularly textured, yet these were very shallow, more like you find on later straight wing bee drachms of the mid 300&#039;s. Here are photos of what these should look like:[ATTACH=full]1039674[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1039675[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1039676[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>Notice how the wings are curved, not droopy. Note how the wings are attached to the bee&#039;s body but are clearly separate parts of the bee attached at a point. Finally notice the incuse punches and the texture and depth of the punches.</p><p><br /></p><p>Looking at the reverses, you have shallow punches that look closer to 4th Century drachms, not 5th Century drachms. But even here the surfaces lack the texture they should have. Here are a few 4th Century drachms for comparison, but notice when you have these more shallow incuses, you have straight wing bees without tendrils....[ATTACH=full]1039677[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1039678[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>So with this group you have bees that have the features of 5th century drachm obverses paired with reverses of 4th Century drachms. That&#039;s just not possible.</p><p><br /></p><p>The metal tests we performed were just an afterthought. We were about to ship them out and I decided just to see what they were made of. I tested 3 and they were all over the place in terms of purity. So I tested 30 and the fineness ranged from 20% to 80%. If these were real you wouldn&#039;t see that variability. Also, I&#039;ve tested 5 authentic ones since and these should be 95-99% pure.</p><p><br /></p><p>Barry Murphy[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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